search cityguideny.com

Things to do this week in NYC Jun 20-Jun 27: Museums

Some of the world's most impressive museums and exhibits are in New York?including the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and (of course) the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of the great things to do in NYC is to visit these spectacular collections. Whether you're a native New Yorker or here on vacation, NYC's museums have something new and interesting to offer everybody! Here is a list of what's going on this week at museums throughout New York City.

Museum visitors can extend their visit and learn more about the work and the ideas in the exhibitions when they visit on a Drop-in weekend. The Education Center is open and offers self-guided, hands-on projects for all age levels.

Approximately 50 works of art that illustrate the height of artistic production under court and elite patronage during the first 200 years of the Choson dynasty (1392–1910), a time of extraordinary cultural achievements. The diverse yet cohesive group of secular and religious paintings, porcelain, sculpture, lacquer, and metalwork will highlight the aesthetics, conventions, and innovations of a Neo-Confucian elite and its artistic milieu. This will be the first in a series of special exhibitions at the Museum focusing on significant periods in Korean art history.

Museum visitors can extend their visit and learn more about the work and the ideas in the exhibitions when they visit on a Drop-in weekend. The Education Center is open and offers self-guided, hands-on projects for all age levels.

At the end of each spring semester, National Academy students submit work to a jury of Academicians, School Committee members, and Instructors who select work for the Annual Student Exhibition. Approximately two hundred are chosen and Third Year certificate students show a body of work on their own special wall. A prize jury, made up of National Academicians, determines cash prizes, winners of traveling awards, and scholarships.

For "Younger Than Jesus," the first edition of "The Generational," the New Museum's new signature triennial, fifty artists from twenty-five countries will be presented. The only exhibition of its kind in the United States, "The Generational: Younger Than Jesus" offers a rich, intricate, multidisciplinary exploration of the work being produced by a new generation of artists born after 1976. Known to demographers, marketers, sociologists, and pundits variously as the Millennials, Generation Y, iGeneration, and Generation Me, this age group has yet to be described in any way beyond their habits of consumption.

An exhibition of 83 photographs documenting some of the most significant buildings and public parks in New York City. The exhibition has traveled to 82 countries under the sponsorship of the United States Department of State since 2006 and is now coming home to New York for its final showing. The photographs in the exhibition will then enter the collection of the New-York Historical Society, through a donation from the exhibition's curator, Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel.

Portraiture is one of the most powerful and significant expressions of figurative art, and in the Himalayas the subjects of religious portraits are exclusively religious teachers, or gurus. By preserving the physical appearance of a guru, an icon is produced that can charismatically substitute for the teacher in his physical absence. As such these portraits often embody the teachings of the guru and the traits of the enlightened mind.

John Wood (born 1922) has consistently challenged traditional photography, often incorporating painting, drawing, and collage as well as cliché verre, solarization, and offset lithography. Transgressing the boundaries of "pure photography," his eclectic practice has helped usher in alternative approaches to the medium. With their adroit manipulations of picture and text, his diaristic, multi-media compositions anticipate today's digital imagery. On the Edge of Clear Meaning is Wood's first museum retrospective, spanning his career from the early 1960s to the present.

This is the first major museum exhibition to focus exclusively on "The Pictures Generation," a tightly knit group of New York artists who created some of the most important and influential works of the late-twentieth-century. Born into the media culture of postwar America, their overarching subject was how pictures of all kinds not only depict but also shape reality. Highly seductive photographs by Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman reveal the ways in which images from B movies and magazine advertisements determine much of our sense of who we are. Louise Lawler and Sherrie Levine examine how the myths and legends of modern art are inextricably tied to the institutions of the museum and art history. Also included are photographs by Laurie Simmons, James Casebere, James Welling, and Allan McCollum, as well as works in other media by Robert Longo, Troy Brauntuch, David Salle, among others.

The porcelain factories of Berlin, Sevres, and Vienna achieved an extraordinary level of both artistic and technical skill in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the quality of painted decoration practiced at these three factories at that time has never been surpassed. This exhibition brings together approximately seventy-five superb examples from these three European porcelain manufactories and illustrates the exchange of ideas and styles between the factories that resulted in some of the most remarkable porcelain ever produced.

The exhibition explores the reciprocal relationship between high fashion and evolving ideals of beauty, and will focus on iconic fashion models of the 20th century and their roles in projecting, and sometimes inspiring, the fashion of their respective eras.

Drawn from the Morgan's collection, the exhibition examines the origins of modern scenic design and chronicles the evolution of stage sets during the highly innovative period of ca. 1900 to 1970. On view are over fifty drawings, derived entirely from the Morgan's holdings, principally from the collection formed by the celebrated American set designer Donald Oenslager. Enriching these color drawings is related material, including musical scores, rare books, and autograph manuscripts, as well as more than thirty performance photographs documenting the finished set.

A painting tradition established in the traveling courts of the great Tibetan Karmapas, most of what we know of the Encampment Style belongs to its 18th-century revival by the great scholar-painter Situ Panchen Chokyi Jungne (1700-1774). A combination of Indio-Nepali and Chinese artistic influences, the Encampment style was fostered under the tutelage and support of Situ, who acted as both artist and patron. For the first time anywhere, Patron and Painter: Situ Panchen and the Revival of the Encampment Style traces his career and artistic legacy.

Fifty years after the realization of Frank Lloyd Wright's renowned design, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum celebrates the golden anniversary of its landmark building. The 50th anniversary exhibition brings together sixty-four projects designed by one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, including privately commissioned residences, civic and government buildings, religious and performance spaces, as well as unrealized urban mega-structures.

Beginning in the 1940s, Isamu Noguchi began using small paper models as an aid in creating his larger biomorphic sculptures. Noguchi continued this practice for the rest of his career, using plaster maquettes to envision larger stone or metal works, often including penciled instructions on them to guide different technical effects. In this small exhibition created in conjunction with The Noguchi Museum's Education Department, a selection of Noguchi's maquettes is presented with photographs and finished sculptures to illustrate both Noguchi's faithfulness to his original ideas and his flexibility in response to the unpredictable nature of stone.

After more than 30 years of portraying the human figure with a neo-expressionist style, Michael Hafftka turns to his Jewish heritage for subject matter and inspiration in his new exhibition, I of the Storm: Michael Hafftka, Recent Work, at the Yeshiva University Museum. Frequently compared to the painters Soutine, Goya and Rouault, Hafftka here makes use of mystical images, biblical themes and the Hebrew alphabet in watercolors and oils. The exhibition runs from March 22, 2009 through August 30, 2009.
Alef-Bet – A group of 22 watercolors based on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The series is an exploration of contemporary Jewish themes and a tribute to the artist’s parents who were survivors of the Holocaust.
Zohar – A group of watercolors based on The Zohar, or Book of Splendor. Hafftka's expressionism serves as a visual exegesis of this 13th century Jewish mystical text, which is widely considered the most important work of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism.
Oil Paintings – Several recent works on Jewish or biblical themes including "The Flood," "Honi Ha Me'aggel" (Honi the Circledrawer) and "Babel." A centerpiece of this group is "The Hill (Jerusalem)," a large-scale triptych that the artist recently donated to Yeshiva University Museum.
The son of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Europe, Hafftka was born in Manhattan in 1953 and raised in the Bronx. After the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973, he volunteered to work on a Kibbutz in Israel for a year. The experience, which the artist says was accompanied by a series of visions and mystical dreams, led him to experiment with painting, which became his true vocation.
A book of Hafftka's work, Michael Hafftka – Selected Drawings, was published in the early eighties, which led to Barbara Flynn of Art Galaxy offering Hafftka his first 82. Hafftka's work is represented in the permanent collections of, among others, The Metropolitan Museum, Museum Of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York Public Library Collection, Housatonic Museum of Art, Arizona State University Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, and the Yeshiva University Museum.

Drawn from the paintings and sculpture of this era acquired by Guggenheim director James Johnson Sweeney during his tenure from 1952 to 1960, The Sweeney Decade features examples of international post-World War II trends in abstraction, including Abstract Expressionism, L'Art Informel, CoBrA, and Tachisme.

A selection of 58 master drawings representing the distillation of the finest works assembled over two generations of collecting by Subhash Kapoor and his late father, Shree Parshotam Ram Kapoor. The exhibition will feature a wide variety of works on paper executed principally in black ink, sometimes enhanced with watercolor, typically on fine laminated papers. It will include a number of exemplary finished drawings, which were generally retained within artist studios as reference works upon which finished paintings were based.

Ulysses Davis (1914 - 1990) was a Savannah, Georgia, barber who created a diverse but unified body of highly refined sculpture that reflects his deep faith, humor, and dignity. His carvings were featured in the seminal 1982 exhibition "Black Folk Art in America, 1930 - 1980" at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where they were applauded as important examples of African American vernacular art. Because he wanted his work to stay together after he died, Davis rarely sold his sculptures. He said, "They're my treasure. If I sold these, I'd be really poor." As a result, the carvings have had little exposure outside Savannah, particularly since his death, and Davis is little known outside folk art circles. In 1988, Davis received a Georgia Governor's Award in the Arts.

The first major U.S. museum exhibition to survey contemporary innovation in industrial ceramic production and the renaissance of ceramics in art and design today. The exhibition explores how artists and designers are reviving interest in ceramics through collaborations with industry that enhance and sometimes subvert the industrial process.

Drawn entirely from the extensive resources of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Arts of
the Ming Dynasty: China's Age of Brilliance will present a grand array of artworks created
during one of the most celebrated dynasties in Chinese history. Featuring 80paintings and
calligraphies, including masterpieces by Wen Zhengming (1470–1559), Dong Qichang
(1555–1636), and Chen Hongshou (1599–1652), the exhibition will examine various
artistic trends as well as the distinctive personal expressions of many of the leading artists of
the time. The works will be complemented by a selection of textiles, ceramics, lacquers,
cloisonnés, jades, and bamboo carvings that will showcase the material prosperity
experienced during the period.

This exhibition comprises approximately fifty lavish single leaves, dating from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. Pierpont Morgan, the preeminent collector of complete medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, also acquired single pages as did many collectors who developed an appreciation for these orphaned leaves during the nineteenth century. Leaves acquired over the last hundred years, including those of Italian, English, French, Flemish, German, Hungarian, and Spanish origin, are being shown. A dozen of these leaves are on view for the first time.

A major force in the international studio glass movement, Klaus Moje has pushed the expressive and technical possibilities of glass for more than five decades. In this comprehensive, 30-year survey, the Museum of Arts and Design traces the progression of Moje's work, from his early carved crystal glass pieces, to his intricately patterned vessels of layered glass, to his recent multi-panel fused works.

Ancient Afghanistan -- at the crossroads of major trade routes and the focus of invasions by great powers and nomadic migrations -- was home to some of the most complex, rich, and original civilizations on the continent of Asia. This exhibition will celebrate the unique role of Afghanistan as a center for both the reception of diverse cultural elements and the creation of original styles of art that combine multiple stylistic materials -- such as the Hellenized examples from the second-century B.C. city of Aï Khanum, the array of trade goods found in the first-century city of Begram, and the astonishing nomadic gold found in the hoard at Tillya Tepe, which also dates to the first century. It will also commemorate the heroic rescue of the heritage of one of the world's great civilizations, whose precious treasures were thought to have been destroyed. Among the highlights of the exhibition will be gold vessels from the Tepe Fullol hoard; superb works and architectural elements from Aï Khanum; Indian-style sculptural masterpieces in ivory, plaster medallions, and Roman glass from Begram; and extraordinary turquoise-encrusted gold jewelry and ornaments from the tombs at Tillya Tepe.

"Amsterdam/New Amsterdam: The Worlds of Henry Hudson" investigates how Henry Hudson's epic third voyage of exploration planted the seeds of a modern society that took root and flourished in the New World. The exhibition features rare 17th-century maps and globes, navigational instruments, paintings, Native American artifacts, household objects, and archaeological material from major European and American collections.

n honor of the presidential inauguration on January 20, 2009, Taking the Oath will revisit the United States' momentous first presidential inauguration and exhibit significant artifacts from that day, including Washington's inaugural chair and the Federal Hall balustrade.

Presenting over one hundred works that underscore the great scope of the Morgan's collecting interests, the exhibition includes old master and modern drawings, literary and musical manuscripts, illuminated texts, and rare printed books and bindings. The selections were drawn from more than 1,200 works acquired since 2004 and include seminal figures from various genres.

A formal commemoration of the reopening of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in its completely renovated state. While the Museum's first floor galleries and indoor/outdoor space have remained relatively unchanged, this exhibition will mark the first time the Permanent Collection will be on view in its entirety since the spring of 2002. Through consultation of the Museum's vast photographic archives, every effort will be made to present the collection as close to Noguchi's original intentions as possible. By June 17, a number of objects loaned to exhibitions abroad will also be returned to their intended configuration in the Museum's galleries and garden. A number of recent acquisitions to the Museum's collections, including a recently fabricated model reproducing Noguchi's ambitious design for the five-acre site at the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden in Jerusalem from 1960 – 1965 will also be on view.

American artist Roxy Paine (b. 1966) has created a 130-foot-long by 45-foot-wide stainless-steel sculpture, especially for the Museum's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. Giving viewers the sense of being immersed in the midst of a cataclysmic force of nature, Maelstrom (2009) is Paine's largest and most ambitious work to date. The latest in a diverse body of work, this sculpture is one of the artist's Dendroids based on systems such as vascular networks, tree roots, industrial piping, and fungal mycelia. Set against Central Park and its architectural backdrop, the installation explores the interplay between the natural world and the built environment amid nature's inherently chaotic processes.

The introduction of esoteric Buddhism to Japan from mainland China in the ninth-century forever changed the visual landscape of Japanese religion and of Japanese art as a whole. The rituals of Mikkyo Buddhism, or the "Secret Teachings" as the newly imported doctrine was called, involve a preponderance of arrestingly beautiful and fearsome images that aim to reveal ultimate truths to the initiated. At the core of Mikkyo is the Mandala of Both Realms, paired cosmic diagrams of the Diamond World and the Matrix World. The installation explores the art of Mikkyo Buddhism from the models used to create these mandalas to the images they inspired. Important early iconographic drawings, paintings, sculpture, and textiles from the Metropolitan's permanent collection are displayed with outstanding works from other institutions and private collections.

Surrealist artists, writers, and poets placed persistent emphasis on the power of the imagination to transform the everyday. Beginning in the early 1930s, the production of elliptically erotic, sexually charged objects and sculptures became central to their concerns. This exhibition features some of the most notorious works, including Salvador Dalí's bread-and-inkwell-crowned Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933) and Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined teacup (1936).

The New-York Historical Society holds one of the nation's premiere collections of eighteenth-century American portraits, works that art historian James Thomas Flexner called "the first flowers of our wilderness." This installation provides twenty-first century viewers with ways of understanding these remarkably innovative and engaging paintings, some of the earliest works of American art. The exhibition focuses on 26 eighteenth-century portraits that mark the beginnings of New York's primacy as a cultural center. It also includes a sampling of related objects from other N-YHS collections. It also speaks to the ways that these works have changed over time as a result of aging materials and conservation treatments.